(For a national view of public education reform see the end of this blog post)

In trying to address and fight the concerted and coordinated neo-liberal agenda to nationalize the as much as $370 billion public education "business" in the United States, I have had the pleasure of meeting some incredible people all over this country who know the essential place public education must play, if we are to survive as a democratic and equitable society for all of our citizens.

Karen Horwitz, who started the National Association to Prevent Teacher Abuse (NAPTA) that now has 1400 members consisting of excellent teachers who have already been summarily removed from teaching all over the country for standing up for high quality public education, while refusing to go along with the corruption that has become all too common in these district, gave me the name of Carrie Clark in the Sacramento area, who had reported her district's improprieties with attendance and building funds.

Carrie in turn gave me the name of Kathleen Carroll, esq., who had been an attorney for California Teacher Credentialing (CTC), until she pointed out retaliation against CTC employees, if they did not go along with CTC policy that included improper procedures that denied teachers appearing before it due process of law. In addition, Ms. Carroll as a member of the State Bar of California, was under an affirmative duty to not go along with other corrupt policies as diverse as sanctioning nepotism or allowing teachers to be railroad by districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) on trumped up charges that in no way gave these teachers the fair and impartial hearing they were entitled to under law. Rather, they had their credentials summarily revoked.

Kathleen Carroll was supposed to testify on Monday, May 9th before a committee of the California State Legislature looking into these allegations of impropriety at CTC about corruption within this agency, but when I turned on the coverage of the hearing by local Sacramento CBS affiliate channel 13 with the Internet link Ms. Carroll sent me, I couldn't believe my eyes at the distortion Sacramento CBS affiliate Channel 13 had the dishonesty to air as "news."

What these disreputable "reporters" had done was front load the piece with a totally unrelated and unsubstantiated introduction about "bad teachers," who were accused of having shown "pornography to their students" or another teacher, who had "committed rape...off campus." The introduction went on further to talk about "thousands of teachers," that had done bad things, but which CTC had never even bothered to investigate.

None of this had anything at all to do with Attorney Kathleen Carroll's testimony about CTC corruption within the CTC and had nothing to do with "bad" teachers, other than the fact that teachers had been denied due process in CTC's sloppy handling of files presented by districts like LAUSD's in their attempts to railroad these teachers out of the profession without cause or with highly suspect documentation of allegations that might justify removing a teacher's teaching credential and with it their livelihood..

Attorney Carroll herself for trying to bring these corrupt practices to her superiors at CTC had been removed as an employee of CTC in retaliation for seeking justice and impartial process in CTC's handing of its business. The harassment and dismissal of Kathleen Carroll was very reminiscent of how LAUSD and other school district throughout the state and throughout the country are going after perfectly excellent and professional teachers in bad faith, because they too had the courage to speak up against corruption.

Instead of the viewers of this overtly manipulated piece of yellow journalism relating to an independent state agency's determination of 46% of CTC employees fearing reprisals if they spoke up against CTC administrative corruption with regard to its own internal operation, the contrived opening of the "news item" refocused CTC corruption on letting outrageously bad teachers get off, something that was clearly not true and which Channel 13 offered no evidence to show that it was.

Again, the preconceived "dominant narrative" that mainstream media is programmed to spew out all over this country that vilifies and lays all blame for bad public education on teachers is allowed to trump reality of corruption and fraud from LAUSD and other incompetently run public school districts around the state and around the country all the way up to the state and national levels that allows it to continue unchecked.

As if this wasn't bad enough, one of the reporters at local CBS Sacramento affiliate Channel 13 was confronted after the piece aired as to its distortion of what had actually taken place. His only response was, "Stories about sex is what our audience wants to see." This brought to mind something the late comedian George Carlin once said:

This site was launched in March 2008, with Dick and Sharon doing most of the writing. Today, a host of gifted writers
contribute to the LA Progressive's daily offering which typically
amounts to about 45 articles a week. Dick and Sharon continue to write
for as well as edit and publish the LA Progressive and distribute its daily e-news each morning.

Assistant Professor of English at Riverside Community College and former high school English teacher. She is the author of Teacher at Point Blank
and has been a teacher of English and literature in California since
1991. Her writing on intersections of gender, violence, and education
has appeared in the Los Angeles Times as well as literary venues
including Hotel Amerika, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Ninth Letter,
Memoir(and), Bitter Oleander, and Green Mountains Review. Her essay,
"Recovering Teacher," won the NCTE 2009 Donald Murray Prize, and other
selections of her work have received a Pushcart Special Mention as well
as Notable listings in Best American Essays 2009 and 2010. As an
independent researcher, Jo authored and published the most extensive
study to-date of Adams v. LAUSD, a nearly 10-year legal case of
student-on-teacher sexual harassment, in (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes
of Justice in Women's Experience (Cambridge Scholars Press). Jo values
the aesthetic, political, and socially transformative powers of literary
narrative--especially to dispel unhealthy silences and witness cultural
blindspots. She works currently as an assistant professor of English at
Riverside Community College in SoCal, and her book, Teacher at Point
Blank (Aunt Lute 2010), has been selected as a Great Read for Fall 2010
by Ms. Magazine. Punk rock? Yes. Hockey games? Yes. Coffee? Always
black. Find Jo on the web at joscottcoe.com and on Twitter @joscottcoe.

Betsy Combier New York, New Yorkbetsy.combier@gmail.com Betsy Combier's blog http://www.parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=488is
a jewel that chronicles the corruption in NYC's Dept of Educations
(DOE) . She has accomplished a wonderful piece of journalism, and
created one of the rare places where corrupt educational governance is
chronicled and revealed

Professor Samuel Culbert Los Angeles, California<nobull2u@gmail.com>is
a professor at the UCLA Andersen School of Business who also teaches in
the Education Department's Principals' Leadership Institute. Check out
the following 3 minutes on ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/conversation-performance-review-11126992

Has been a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 30
years. He is greatly aware of the district waste, large bureaucracy, and
other major issues of the time. He started his blog with the sole
purpose of informing the world about the truths of education in LAUSD.
E-mail him at: StuartComputers@gmail.com.

LAUSD has selected a new Superintendent of Schools

Karen Horwitz Chicago, IllinoisTeacher
Activist forced out of teaching on trumped up charges. Started NAPTA to
expose the reality of teacher harassment and terrorization maintain
corruption and mediocrity teacherKH@aol.comEndTeacherAbuse.orgNAPTA- National Association for Prevention of Teacher AbuseGraduated
with honors in 1963 from Oak Park River Forest High School in Oak Park,
Illinois, and with honors from the University of Illinois, Champaign
where she earned a B.A. in Elementary Education in 1966. She taught
elementary school for four years in Berwyn and Hillside, Illinois as
well as Phoenix, Arizona, before starting a family. She felt a calling
to teach elementary students so that she could share her strength in
preparing children to succeed as students and as citizens, goals that
she believes require talented teachers to be realized. When teaching
jobs were scarce during the 1970's, she worked in business as a sales
representative and as a marketing director for an educational film
company. However, teaching always was her first love. She eagerly
returned to elementary teaching in her forties after earning an M. Ed in
Reading at National Louis University in Evanston, Illinois in 1992. She
has raised three children and has grandchildren who inspire her to do
the work of exposing the truth about Education; she believes that they,
as well as all children, deserve better - much better.

Susan Ohanian Charlotte, Vermontsusano@gmavt.nethttp://www.susanohanian.orgShe
is a longtime public school teacher who, after 20 years, became staff
writer for a teacher magazine and then went freelance. I've maintained a
website of activism for nearly 9 years--ever since the passage of NCLB.
People can subscribe to the website and then they get updates about new
content. I answer all the mail I get through the website and with the
answer, people have my e-mail. I also try to stir things up on Twitter,
though I find this medium frustrating. I have a Facebook page--just so
people can find me. I don't initiate anything on it, The website keeps
me busy.http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=9593

Susan Lee Schwartz Suffern, New York

Susan studied
literacy education, English literature, and fine arts and holds a BA
('63) and MS ('65) from Brooklyn College, and has the equivalent of two
master's degrees, earned in graduate studies of literacy, arts and
education. She taught literacy skills and art, for four decades in NYC
in elementary and secondary school. In 1998 she won the New York State
English Council (NYSEC) Educator of Excellence Award for
her successful teacher practice, studied by Harvard and the LRDC at
the University of Pittsburgh for the New Standards research.At the end of her research, her unique curriculum was selected by the LRDC to be used in their national staff development seminars for school superintendents. She was among six teachers -- from among the thousands across the nation-- observed during the research project, and her teaching practice met all the principles of learning.
In the nineties, she rose to prominence in national educational
circles, while teaching at a new magnet school, East Side Middle School.
The reading scores of her seventh grade students were at the top of the
city, and on the first ELA, which two thirds of city students failed,
her former students (then in the eight grade) were TENTH IN THE STATE.

She writes
often about what she learned about the genuine standards for learning,
in an attempt to begin a national conversation about the authentic
standards, so that there can be genuine reform. Her experience that
ended her fine career in the NYC Public Schools has led her to write
about the process that removed the top educators, silencing the voices
of the classroom practitioners who would not accept anti-learning
policies. Her essay here on Perdaily, is one that describes this
process. Read more as she talks about education, literacy and learning
on her site, from the perspective of the experienced
teacher-practitioner of pedagogy. She is the voice of dedicated and talented classroom teachers who know why the schools are failing.

HER STORY:"I know first hand the financial, personal, emotional
and physical damage that can result when school administrators, the
Montana Education Association and the National Education Association put
their own interests above the students, teachers and the taxpayers of
the State of Montana My files contain mountains of paperwork including
depositions, declarations of truth, notarized documents and exhibits
resulting from an arduous legal process that finally ended when the
Havre (Montana) School District settled two lawsuits - a Federal suit
and one filed in State District Court. These documents also include a
letter from a union representative stating, " This is nothing more than a
witch hunt." Yet the union continued to allow the school administration
to harass, bully and bring harm to me.These two lawsuits resulted
from a single incident that, had it been handled differently and under
the light of public scrutiny, would not have snowballed into awards of
more than $200,000 worth of damages. Funds that eventually came from the
taxpayers' pockets. Ironically, as a taxpayer in Hill County, my family
and I are helping to pay for the damages awarded to me. This covered
the attorneys' fees. The settlement did not include my attorney fees,
however the district, insurance and taxpayers paid the defendants
attorney bills, which exceeded mine. The settlement was made on March 2,
2006."

Sabrina Stevens Shupe Denver, ColoradoTeacherSabrinaFSP@gmail.com"I
went into teaching because I (mistakenly) believed the hype about bad
teachers in our worst-performing schools, and I wanted to Be the change I
wished to see in the world. When I was rushed to the hospital after
fainting from exhaustion in my classroom, I started to suspect that the
situation might be more complicated than the conventional wisdom on
education reform would have us believe."Excellent Colorado teacher who was forced out of the profession for being a dedicated and conscientious teacher.TeacherSabrinaFSP@gmail.comhttp://failingschools.wordpress.com@TeacherSabrina on Twitter

Jim Taylor, Ph.D., Psychology San Francisco, Californiaemail: mailto:jim@drjimtaylor.comweb site: www.drjimtaylor.comJim
Taylor is an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. He
is the author of three parenting books and speaks regularly to students,
parents, and educators around the U.S. He blogs on education issues for
psychologytoday.com, huffingtonpost.com, sfgate.com, seattlepi.com, and other web sites around the country, as well as on his own web site.

http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/blog/5Democracy Nowhttp://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/3/educators_push_back_against_obamas_businessRESEARCH INTERESTSImpact of urban school characteristics on teachers' classroom practiceHow race, class, and gender mediate academic achievementTeachers' work and the school as a workplaceEffects of changes in global political economy on teaching, teachers, and schools.

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